cinta adhesiva

This week was eventful to say the least.  Our staff has been studying spiritual warfare this semester, and we saw evidence of it in each classroom.  As expected, though, God has carried us through it!

In art class we’ve been having some fun with packing tape.  Inspired by sculptor Mark Jenkins, we have been making sculptures of our own.  (Visit his website to see some really interesting photos http://xmarkjenkinsx.com/)  What started out as a project for the oldest kids has quickly spread around the school.  Almost every student has, at this point, wrapped something or has been wrapped.  I seldom see the kids this excited about something.  I rarely see the little ones sit as still as they do when they are being wrapped!  Who knew that hours of entertainment could be provided by plastic wrap, packing tape, and scissors?

We are currently making a life-sized statue of Johanely.  I’ll post the final product as well as the rest of the sculptures when they are finished.

 

 

 

una iguana

Here’s some fun from Friday…

I ran upstairs to get my camera at the end of the day to take some pictures of my kids during art class.  On my way past the school kitchen, something caught my eye.  It was a HUGE iguana slowly making its way to a patch of sunlight outside the door.  Until that point, I had only ever seen one iguana up close, but the magnitude of this lizard could not compare to my previous encounter! 

So, I took some pictures (in case it should run away before I could find some witnesses), and then ran to tell everyone.  We all gathered around to oooh and ahhh, and then we tried to shoo it away so the dogs wouldn’t kill it later.  But this was one stubborn iguana!  It wouldn’t move, so we got a mop and chased it.  As you can tell from these photos, the iguana would not leave without a fight.

 

 

Just another day at ESD!

perfecto

Faithful blog followers, I apologize for my recent inactivity.  I haven’t been well for a few weeks.  But now I am getting back to normal and am ready to continue…

A week ago (I had already not been feeling well for 2 weeks), I thought I was finally getting better, and then—WHAM!—I felt worse than before.  And thanks to God’s perfect timing, when I was feeling my worst and truly needing to take a sick day, I had a perfect substitute for my class.  We have a friend who is a deaf teacher of deaf students in the U.S., and she enjoys coming down from time to time to visit and work with our students.  She had recently taught a unit about myths to her own students and was eager to share this with mine.  So when I said God’s perfect timing, I meant it because we are right in the middle of our own myth unit!  It doesn’t end there, though.  I have been incorporating video-making into this unit, and this is exactly what our visitor wanted to teach.  So for three days last week, my students and I had the opportunity to watch a master teacher at work, teaching exactly what my students needed to learn!  Pretty cool, huh?

We also had a mother-daughter team visit last week, and they had planned arts-and-crafts for all the kids—which meant that all my art classes were covered for the week.  God is so good!

(And if Julia or Andrea is reading this…thanks again!)

I finally made it back to church today.  My pastor has been preaching a lot recently on the end times and life after death, and this sermon hit me, so I thought I’d share it.  He preached on Luke 16:19-31.  Perhaps this is a familiar passage to you.  It talks about a rich and a poor man who both die.  The rich man goes to hell and the poor man to heaven.  When the rich man is convinced that he will spend eternity suffering with no hope of relief, he begs Abraham to send the poor man to earth to warn his family to repent and turn their lives to God so they will not suffer the same fate.  Abraham replies that if they don’t believe the warnings from Moses and the prophets to repent, they won’t believe a dead man either.  Most of us try not to think too much about hell, but the Bible is clear that it will be eternal torture with no hope of relief.  Thankfully, we all have the opportunity to join the poor man and Abraham in heaven.  All we have to do is open our hearts to Jesus.  Something to think about…

Until next time…

los mitos

I can’t believe it’s already February.  The past two weeks in my classroom have been exhausting as teenage emotions and drama have been present in full force.  But nonetheless, we’ve been pushing forward and we’re still smiling sometimes!

Here’s a highlight from the week:

In writing class, we’ve been studying myths.  Last week my students chose a myth that they would practice and perform in American Sign Language on video.  It was a real treat to watch their progression as they learned and practiced their myths this week.  They were actually asking for more time to do so every day.  There was a lot of nervous laughter as they came face-to-face with the camera lens, but it in end, all the stories came out very well.  This has also been a good learning experience for me as I was able to see various ASL storytelling techniques. 

(I hope to post the myth videos soon.)

Please pray for en extra measure of God’s peace in our classrooms and in the lives of our students in the weeks and months to come.